ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA Minnesota Representative Betty McCollum (MN D-4) posted an attack on President-elect Donald Trump on Facebook along with a link to the false news article published by the Washington Post on New Year’s Eve.
The Washington Post reported that Russia had hacked into the US power grid via a Vermont substation. The story was later retracted when authorities discovered that the “hacked” laptop in question was never actually connected to the grid.
As was reported by Forbes, the Washington Post article was shown to be false when “the utility company itself finally issued a formal statement at 9:37PM EST, just an hour and a half after the Post’s publication, pushing back on the Post’s claims: ‘We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization’s grid systems. We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding.’”
That information, however, did not stop democrat leaders from crying foul with their accusations of Russian tampering. In the same Washington Post article, Peter Shumlin, the democratic governor of Vermont said, “Vermonters and all Americans should be both alarmed and outraged that one of the world’s leading thugs, Vladimir Putin, has been attempting to hack our electric grid, which we rely upon to support our quality-of-life, economy, health, and safety. This episode should highlight the urgent need for our federal government to vigorously pursue and put an end to this sort of Russian meddling.”
Rep. Betty McCollum was not the only Minnesota lawmaker to jump onto the “Russia hacked the US power grid” bandwagon. Newly elected State Senator Dan Schoen (D-54A ) tweeted out a series of retweets of the now debunked story along with this comment:
McCollum has scrubbed the post from her Facebook page, since it was revealed that the alleged hacking was actually malware found on a laptop that was not actually connected to the power grid.
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Updated 1/03/2017 4:36pm
Andrea Mayer-Bruestle
Andrea Mayer-Bruestle is a former writer for Alpha News.
